Dead By Dawn
by notmanos
Summary: (Pre-season 1) Teen Sam is tired of pretending to be a "normal family" with his Dad and Dean, and sneaks out for a night of innocent fun. Which quickly becomes a nightmare, as a new evil rises, and is determined to kill everything in its path.
1. Made To Disappear

_**1 -Made To Disappear**_

"He should have been home by now," Dean said, for the third time tonight.

Sam rolled his eyes, glad Dean couldn't see him from the kitchen. "Dad's an adult. He'll be fine. He's after what, a werewolf? He can get those in his sleep." Sam went back to reading his book, not caring at all about Dean's anxiety snit. Part of him wanted to point out Dean was worrying more about Dad than dad had ever seemed to worry about them, but kept it to himself. It'd just end in an argument, and a boring argument they'd had several times before. Truth be told, he would have given anything for a new fight.

Dean paced in the kitchen, continuing to pretend there was something to clean up in there. Dean had been obsessive compulsively cleaning the kitchen and checking his phone every five minutes, waiting for word from Dad, who told Dean to stay behind and watch after him. Which was stupid. Sam was fifteen years old, and sure as hell didn't need a babysittter; certainly not his nineteen year old, reckless asshole of a brother, who often acted more like a Dad - to both him and Dad! How fucked up was that?

Not that Dean noticed. He was still pretending they were a normal-ish family, and that they weren't doomed. Sam sincerely hoped he could escape whatever it was that made the Winchesters so fucked up, although ... no, not thinking about that tonight. He'd gone two weeks without one of those things, and he was going to jinx it.

Sam was so irritated tonight he wanted to start throwing chairs and screaming, but didn't dare say a word, because Dean would probably give him that patronizing "hormonal teenager" bullshit. Just because he was a teenager didn't mean he was flying off the handle for no reason, or that his anger wasn't genuine. They'd been living in Western Washington for almost an entire month, and they'd seen Dad ... maybe six days? Dad had said they were going to live like an actual family for a while, and apparently his conception of that was he was never home, and Sam and Dean did everything. Which, honestly, was exactly how the Winchester family functioned, so maybe his Dad wasn't a complete fucking liar. Just a con man, conning his kids into believeing they mattered for once. Dean didn't see it that way, though, or at least pretended he didn't. Dean made excuses for him - things "came up". As if they were ever going to stop coming up! Dean didn't want to admit hunting monsters meant more to Dad than they did. He probably wasn't ever going to admit it. Sam couldn't help but think of his brother as a lost cause. As soon as he was eighteen, he was so fucking out of here it wasn't funny.

Sam's bookmark fell to his lap, and only when he picked it up did he see it was actually the note he hid in the book at school. Mr. Palmer was a real hard ass about passing notes, as if that was the end of the fucking world or something. Making sure Dean wasn't looking his way - he was not; he was now cleaning out their fridge, like there wasn't a handful of stuff in there, because Dad seemed to forget to shop - he opened the note, hiding it inside his book just in case. It was from Lia, who was the prettiest girl in his English class, and pretty damn smart, too. She turned him on to some great science fiction books he hadn't heard of before. The note, in her loopy cursive, said, _"Sam - My sister and some of her friends are going out tonight to see if we can't find the old summer camp. Want to come with us? It'll be fun. We're meeting at the end of Five Mile Road at 11:30. Bring a flashlight! - Lia"_

Sam had to ask to find out what this was about. Apparently there were the remains of an old summer camp in the woods - Camp Pinewood, or something as unimaginative as that - and it was a local tradition to go looking for it, while really getting drunk and making out in the woods. Now Sam didn't think this was an invitation to get drunk and make out with Lia, especially since her sister was going to be there, but the more he thought about it, the more he liked the idea. Didn't normal kids do stupid shit like this all the time? Just fuck around and do nothing productive, because they were kids? It also might be fun to look for a place just to look for it, not search for werewolves or ghosts or whatever the hell.

He wasn't going to tell Dean, because Dean could have had one of a couple of different reactions, none that were any good. He might tell him no; he might invite himself along (hell no!); he might say he should go, but load him down with salt and silver and all kinds of shit that would have had his classmates looking at him like a complete psychopath within two seconds. He'd have to sneak out, but that was doable. He'd snuck out before.

Finally they heard the rumble of the Impala's engine in the driveway, and Dean jumped up and turned towards the door, but instantly froze. There was a complex and confusing expression on his face, and Sam guessed he'd locked himself up. Did he greet him at the door, or pretend he hadn't been fretting about Dad's late return for the past twenty minutes? Dean's uncertainty had locked him up. Sam shook his head, shoved the folded note in between some back pages, and went back to reading. His brother was so embarrassing.

A minute or so later, there was a mild thump against the door, and while Dean immediately headed there, Dad managed to stumble in the door before he could reach it. Sam looked up, about to make a crack about how graceful he was, when he saw Dad had left a red smear on the door.

Dean caught Dad as he stumbled forward. "Goddamn it! We need to get you to a hopital."

"No hospital," Dad said, putting his arm around Dean's shoulders and leaning against him. "It's flesh wounds. Just sew me up."

"Were you bit?" Dean asked, clearly alarmed. As he should have been, because if he had been bitten by a werewolf ...

"No. He had friends with knives."

"Sam, get the first aid kit," Dean said, helping Dad back towards his bedroom. Although he didn't really want to help - what the hell was he, a dog? Did he follow commands? - Sam still set his book aside and went to get it. Since it was a hunter's house, they actually had more than one, just like they had more than one set of weapons. Always be prepared and all that good, crazy closest one was in the kitchen, so Sam got the kit and walked back to the bedroom, trying and failing to notice the trail of blood drops on the floor. It was selfish to wish they could have been any other family, wasn't it? He still couldn't help it. He still wished they weren't a bunch of fucking monster hunters.

In the bedroom, Dad was sitting on the edge of the bed with his coat off, while Dean was examining his wounds. Now that he could really see him, Sam was shocked. Dad had taken a real beating. One of his eyes was already black, his lower lip was swollen, he had blood around his mouth and nose, and none of that counted the perpendicular slash across his left upper arm that had turned the whole limb crimson. Dean was right - he needed a hospital. But Sam also knew why he wasn't going to go.

"Shit," Dean cursed, wiping at the wound with a towel. It was doing abolutely nothing. Dean met Sam's eyes as he dropped the kit on the bed, and said, "Get the whiskey."

Sam nodded and went to get it while Dean asked the obvious question. "How many of them were there?"

"Uh, five or six."

"Why didn't you bring me along?" Dean asked. "I could've helped."

"I would have if I had known I was in for an ambush."

When Sam returned with the whiskey bottle, Dean was already threading a needle despite his bloody hands. Sam remembered when his home ec teacher was impressed with the fact that he was such an adept sewer, and male, and he wished he could have told her he knew how to do it precisely to stitch up injuries. But of course he couldn't, so he just had to pretend he was the nerd who was good at everything, which made him oh so popular with his peers.

Dean took the whiskey with a nod of thanks, and put down the needle so he could twist the cap off and rinse Dad's arm with it. Dad swallowed a yelp, and gritted his teeth instead, hissing out a breath. Alcohol was a great antibiotic, but it burned like a son of a bitch. Not quite as bad as Supergluing a cut, but it was in the same general territory. Sam wished he didn't know that too.

He stood by, willing to help, but he really wasn't needed. Dean had this. He stitched up Dad's knife wound while he told them the story of how his homicidal werewolf hunt had turned into a fight with some pissed off ghouls, who didn't appreciate him killing a few of them in Eugene last year. Apparently, the whole werewolf thing was a ruse, which was reasonably clever, but Dad managed to get the better of them. Not before getting the shit beat out of him, but ghouls could be pretty rough. They were super fast, and really nasty. Having to deal with more than one of them at once was a nightmare, but leave it to their Dad to walk away from it.

Earlier, Sam had thought that maybe Dad's story about a werewolf was a lie, and he was doing something else, something he didn't want them to know about. Continuing his yellow eyed demon search, most likely. Even Dean was suspicious, though he tried to pretend he wasn't for some damn reason. Did Dean think he was fooling him? Why? Did Dean actually think he hid anything from him? He knew about his secret drinking; he knew about his occasional sampling from the painkillers in the first aid kits; he knew about his nightmares, and his occasional ramblings at night to hunt monsters, raise hell, or all of the above. Neither Dad or Dean was quite as slick as they thought they were.

Sam cleaned the blood off the front door - that was a little too visible for comfort - but skipped the carpet, because it was too much work, and Dean probably had some system for it anyway. Instead, he prepared for bed without actually preparing for bed, going through the motions so Dean would assume he was calling it a night. Early for a Friday, sure, but Sam had been laying the groundwork for this by going to bed relatively early since Wednesday, when Lia gave him the note. What was he, new to sneaking out? Planning was key.

Sam was in bed with his book when Dean came to check on him. "Dad okay?" Sam asked, already aware of the answer.

Dean nodded, drying his hands on a blood free towel. "I still think he should go to the E.R., but he's being a stubborn asshole."

"What a shock."

Dean grimaced, caught between admitting a negative feeling about Dad and ignoring it. "You okay?"

Sam shrugged. "Fine. Hardly the first time Dad came home beat to shit."

"Not what I mean. You've been weirdly quiet all night."

Sam held up his book. "Been reading. It's called homework. You used to do that before you dropped out, remember?" The second it was out of his mouth, Sam wanted to take it back. It wasn't even correct. Dean said he dropped out of school because he hated it, and he surely did, but Sam knew part of the reason - if not all of it - was so he could look after him and Dad and juggle all the monster hunting. It was an impossible set of things to balance before you added classes to the equation. But it also made Sam desperately angry at him too. Why didn't Dean just stand up to their Dad? He didn't have to give away his life to his crazy crusade! Why was he? Dean was a stubborn asshole in every respect but this one. Why?

Dean scowled at him, but whatever evil thing he was going to say, he thought better of it. "Just for that, I'm getting you up early tomorrow for training. Get some sleep."

Sam groaned in disgust as Dean closed his door and left. He didn't need anymore fucking training. Dean was being a sadist now, taking after Dad.

Sam tried to continue reading, but he kept glancing at the clock, and finally gave up and got dressed. He wanted to seem very casual, and not reflect what he was feeling, which boiled down to showing up and shouting, _"Please accept me, normal kids! I don't wanna be freak boy anymore!"_ But he wasn't sure what kind of wardrobe said that, so he stuck with jeans and a t-shirt, and his usual army surplus jacket.

He packed his bed carefully, because a simple pillow under the covers wasn't going to fool Dean. Sam made sure to basically make a lump roughly his size. He was never going to get the shape exactly right, but hopefully it'd be good enough to fool him if he casually checked in later to see if he was sleeping.

Sam went through his flashlights, picking a reasonably small one, as he was sure showing up with a huge one or a camping one would seem too nerdy, and there was no way in hell he was bringing a fucking gun. He did decide to bring a small knife, because he wasn't used to having absolutely no weapons on him, but that itself was troubling. He didn't want to turn into Dean, carrying a million things with him at all times, ready for a sudden demon invasion.

He'd made sure ahead of time that the window made no noise when it opened, and he carefully slid out into the dark, closing the window so carefully you'd think it was a soap bubble about to burst. Couldn't take any chances, not in a house with naturally paranoid men.

Sam didn't allow himself to breathe until he disappeared into the small clutch of woods beside their rental cottage, and was a reasonable distance from the house. With short cuts, Five Mile Road wasn't that far, and nothing at night scared him. He'd seen too many things. Darkness didn't matter all that much. Yeah, monsters could hide in it, but so could people, if they knew what they were doing.

Sam made it to Five Mile and was a little astonished at the number of loitering teens, but fuck it - Greenridge was a very boring town, and beyond this, there wasn't much to do. He saw Lia and her older sister Becky, and Becky's boyfriend Brian, who was some musclehead jock. With them were some of Lia's friends from school - Gabby, Antonio, and Jayna, as well as a girl and a boy he didn't know. he thought he'd seen the girl at the back of his science class, but the boy was a perfect unknown.

Lia turned his way and smiled, running a hand through her short black hair. "Hey Sam, I wasn't sure if you were showing up or not."

Sam shrugged, hoping he seemed casual. "Had to sneak out."

"You got the psycho brother, right?" Brian asked.

Sam's first impulse was to say he wasn't psycho, but of course Dean had to embarrass him during his first week at school. Some of the more sadistic jocks were picking on the smaller, weaker kids and humiliating them after school, and of course Sam wasn't going to stand by and let that happen. He intervened, and got sucker punched in the back of the head by one of those jocks, and it turned into a whole thing. Sam could have fought his way out of it - big or not, they couldn't actually fight for shit - but Dean showed to pick him up, and waded through them like a scythe through a wheat field. One punch put them all down, although Dean didn't do that to the ringleader. He seemed to pick him out right away, and once he was done with his friends, Dean put him in a nasty arm lock and shoved him against the chain link fence, so hard it honestly seemed like his face was going to extrude out the other side. Dean spoke to him in a very low whisper, so Sam didn't hear all of it, but the gist seemed to be if he even looked at Sam or anyone else funny, he was going to sit out the entirety of the football season in a body cast. Dean made him verbally agree to it before letting him go. Not only did the jock show up to school the next day with his arm in a sling - sprained wrist, supposedly - but he had a chain link pattern on his face for the next two days. He was humiliated, and the whole school knew it. People who used to be afraid of him weren't, and it so pissed him off it looked like he was about to explode. He and his friends stared molten death at Sam at school, but avoided him like he was radioactive, which Sam thought was hilarious. And it seemed to raise his social standing. But there was the constant whispering about Sam's "psycho brother". Sam didn't bother to correct anyone, because who cared, right? Besides, let them think Dean was the psycho, so he didn't have to show how psycho he could get too. "Yeah," Sam said, with another shrug.

Lia introduced everyone, and it seemed the boy and girl he didn't know were Tom and Felicia, respectively. They all headed out, down an old logging road that had a chain across it, because spring rains had opened up sizable puddles that were way deeper than you thought, and could easily trap a car. They avoided them, heading for the shadowy pine forest that seemed to go on forever.

Greenridge used to be a logging town, although it wasn't anymore, and part of the old logging forests had been donated to the state as a wildlife preserve. The park service had become one of the town's biggest employers, along with an aerospace firm that had construction facilities in the next county over, but the town was still depressed, and might always remain so. It had been built for one thing, and while it was trying to adjust to something new, it wasn't doing it very well. Sam refused to see a connection between it and him - made for monster hunting, becoming something else- and kept telling himself that a town and a person were two very different things. Which they were. (But didn't he worry?)

It was surprisingly chilly. Sam was starting to see everyone's breath turn into clouds, and he was glad he brought his heavier jacket. Poor Becky was the only one who hadn't dressed for the temperature - a half-shirt? Really? - and looked miserable. Sam was wondering why Brian didn't offer her his coat, and was starting to wonder if he should, when Brian pulled a bottle of schnapps out of his backpack and started passing it around. Sam had a swig to fit in, but god, schnapps was horrible. It tasted too sweet to be enjoyable, but also too rotgut to be enjoyable. It was the worst of both worlds, and this kind, peach, was especially bad. Either have a sweet drink, or have a drink that'd strip paint off a boat - splitting the difference was a terrible compromise. It was warm going down, but he knew it'd be twice as warm coming back up, which it would if you drank too much of it. So he vowed to take one more drink and be done with it.

Somehow, everybody but him knew where they were going. He could see a small path worn into the forest floor - again, this was a boring town and there was nothing to do besides die slow from alcoholism or possibly meth, whatever your drug of choice was - but it still seemed anonymous to him. A dark part with trees. When they got closer, he started to see detritus of people - ripped up potato chip bags, gum wrappers, about a year and half's worth of cigarette butts, crushed beer cans, and the occasional used condom, which was a super nice touch. People were such slobs. No wonder the earth was slowly dying too.

Sam's best guess was they'd walked a quarter mile into the woods, mostly north, and finally stopped at the head of a small incline, that looked down into much denser forest. Blackberry vines were already making walking a hazard, and the farther down you got, the thicker the ground cover. There were some odd shapes, weird shaped shadows within shadows, and once his eyes had adjusted he realized they were parts of old buildings the forest had reclaimed. Maybe an equipment shed or something; no fucking way was it an old camp. They sat in a very loose semi-circle, and Sam had to admit, it still seemed boring, only the surroundings were nicer.

Brian now lit up a joint and started passing it around, and when it came to him, Sam just passed it on. Lia, who was sitting next to him, looked at him curiously. "Don't want any?"

"Pot makes me paranoid," he admitted. "You don't want me freaking out here." Yes, he knew that from sad experience. Dean hadn't yet let him live it down.

She smiled, and a bit of the crescent moon above reflected in her glasses. "I respect a person who knows their limits."

"Limits suck," Brian proclaimed, before downing half the schnapps. If Dean didn't kill him, he might get along with Brian.

There was a flutter of wings, and both Becky and Tom jumped. "What was that?" Becky asked, scanning the trees above them. "Was it a bat?"

"It was probably an owl," Sam said. "This is prime hunting time for them."

"They're not gonna bother us, are they?" Becky asked, still searching the branches. Sam wished her luck, because without a spotlight, you couldn't see shit.

Lia rolled her eyes and sighed at her embarrassing older sister. (Boy, did he know that feeling.) "You're not a mouse, so no, they're not."

"Ain't they the birds that puke instead of shitting?" Brian asked. The joint had made its way back to him, so after asking that, he took a long drag.

Antonio clicked his tongue in disgust. "No. I'm pretty sure they do both."

"Don't all birds puke?" Jayna asked.

"You'd think," Tom said, with a shrug to show he really didn't care.

Silence stretched on, and Sam was beginning to think this was a huge mistake, until he felt Lia's knee touching his. She looked at him with a slightly embarrassed, slightly sly smile, and he realized he was absolutely having the best time of his life.

Antonio took his second hit off the joint and passed it on. After exhaling, he said, "God, this town suuuuucks."

Brian grunted a small laugh. "Yeah, no fucking kidding, I can't wait to get outta here."

And that's when a machete suddenly slammed down into Brian's head, splitting his skull like an overripe melon.


	2. Howl

_**2- Howl**_

Becky let out a high pitched scream and lurched backwards, so quickly she almost knocked herself out on a low hanging branch. They were all on their feet now, but Sam was the only one who had produced a weapon from inside his jacket as a response, his knife now seeming pathetic against a machete, although it was still embedded in Brian's split skull when his body collapsed to the forest floor.

Sam unconsciously put himself in front of Lia, visually assessing the enemy ... and was deeply confused. Because the figure now standing behind Brian's body was a tall man in a shapeless jumpsuit, wearing a grimy hockey mask. "Jason?" Sam said, dumbfounded. What the hell kind of psychopath cosplayed as a movie murderer to murder someone?

The guy pretending to be Jason pulled the machete out of Brian's head, flinging blood, and everybody scattered in different directions, running off into the dark with all the grace of panicked water buffaloes. Except Sam, who realized he couldn't allow this man to have a weapon, and moved in, throwing a kick at the man's wrist as he raised the blade. But his foot went straight through his arm like nothing was there.

A ghost? A ghost holding a machete, and dressed up as a horror movie killer? What the fuck ..?

Sam felt Lia pulling on his arm. "We have to go. Sam!"

Shit! He didn't have any salt on him, or iron. But he wasn't expecting to encounter a ghost in the woods. (Why was there one here? The whole outfit/machete thing didn't make sense, unless it was a body of a man killed on his way to a Halloween party. But there never had been any signs of a ghost here. He researched these woods!)

He let Lia pull him back as Jason raised his machete once again, and they fled into the dark. Sam wondered if there was something out here he could use to banish the ghost, or at the very least, annoy it.

Goddamn it. he should have brought his weapons with him. 

* * *

Dean took a couple of healthy swallows from the whiskey bottle before putting it back. His nerves were jangly, for no obvious reason. He needed a little chemical relaxation.

Dean wanted to talk to Dad more about this supposed ambush by ghouls - he was lying. Dean couldn't call him on it because he was bleeding a lot, and Sam was right there, but come on. Ghouls were going to fuck you up a lot worse than that, and there wasn't a bite or a scratch anywhere on him Dean could see. This looked like humans - or demons who liked to get physical. Were they going to have to move again? Maybe it was for the best. It was nice to be in one place for a while, but he wasn't used to it, and he could feel himself getting restless.

But when he made his way back to Dad's room after a cursory clean up, he was already asleep. Dean got that, because sometimes after a beating, you wanted a nap. Assuming it wasn't head injury related, it seemed to be the body's way of trying to heal. Also, Dad may have popped a couple painkillers while he was out of the room, and that would do it. They had some great Tylenol codeine they got from jaunting over the border to Canada, where they sold it over the counter. Dean loved that stuff, and it was a shame it wasn't OTC here. There was probably some damn reason it wasn't, but Dean didn't care enough to research it.

Well, he was going to have to ask him tomorrow then, find some time when Sam wasn't around or out of earshot. There was just some stuff he didn't need to know, like how truly fucked they were. Dean felt it was bad enough he knew. It made it hard to have hope for anything. It made it hard not to drink yourself into a blind coma every night. Sometimes waking up was disappointing.

Speaking of which, had he given him enough time? Dean walked back to Sam's room, and peeked inside. Yep, He'd set up a pretty good decoy beneath the covers, but he'd forgotten a key element. "Since when are you without your wonderful flowing locks," he said to the fake Sam under the covers. Sam was not as slick as he thought he was. It wasn't like he didn't sneak out, when he was Sam's age or now, and that's why he cut the kid a break. It was a rite of passage. But with some weird shit going down, he felt like he should keep an eye on him.

Dean went to the book he'd been reading all night, which was on his nightstand, and flipped through the pages. He found a note. That explained why he was reading so slowly - his mind was on something else.

"Ooh, the make out woods," Dean chuckled, scanning the note. He'd been there, and it was nothing to write home about. Pretty in the daytime, though. "You dog. But why bring her sister? That's weird." His mind skipped to some outlandish scenarios, but he reeled it back. This was Sam, and a fifteen year old girl. Lia's sister was probably a chaperon or something, to make sure Sam didn't try anything too untoward, or to keep her kid sister from going overboard.

There was no need to go after him, was there? Lia's sister would probably make things super awkward, and Sam would sneak back in before two. But then again, maybe he'd appreciate Dean crashing the party and wanting him to come home. Sometimes Sam was bad at extracting himself from socially awkward scenarios. He was still young enough to get embarrassed and self-conscious. Whereas Dean knew they were all going to die sooner rather than later, so what the fuck did any of this matter? The one good thing about realizing demons were hunting you was it gave you a sense of perspective.

Dean knew he wasn't sleeping, so why the fuck not? Go see if the kid needed saving from himself or his girlfriend. He didn't even need to show himself if he had it under control. Dean was pretty good at sneaking around in the dark at this point. And he knew those woods pretty well. The first thing he did in most towns was find out where the teen make out spots were, because demons and other assorted monsters seemed to love those. All those raging hormones and distracted meat on the hoof.

Dean went and retrieved his leather jacket, got a beer from the fridge, and wondered if he should drive over there or just walk. He knew a shortcut on foot. And besides, his Dad might hear him start the Impala, and he'd have to tell him Sam sneaked out, and he'd probably get upset, as he always seemed to get upset when Sam was out in the world alone. Dean initially thought it was because he was so young, and would be at a disadvantage against adult monsters, but he was starting to suspect more and more there was something else to it. Something Dad refused to tell him. Dean was half way to convincing himself that Sam was simply Dad's favorite - god knew he wasn't - and that was all, but he had this slightly queasy feeling in his gut that it was more complicated than he could ever know. He hated when Dad lied to him, but he also knew, if he didn't want to tell him, he was never going to get it out of him. And he had tried his very best, but, as usual, it wasn't good enough.

Dean downed the beer in four swallows and crushed the can before lobbing it at the can bag and heading out the door. He hadn't felt the alcohol in a single beer since he was Sam's age, but it did give him a brief flush of warmth, which was nice. Was it usually this cold in May? Then again, they were within laughing distance of Canada, so maybe. He never really bothered to check weather reports, because unless you were looking for omens or demon signs, what was the point?

Dean decided to mosey, as he really didn't want to interrupt Sam and his crush. He was curious what she looked like, but it didn't matter. It especially didn't matter if they had to pack up and move this weekend. Well, they'd probably been here long enough. He'd maxed out the last really good credit card paying the electricity bill. Dean wondered how much of their lives boiled down to running from demons versus running from creditors. It was probably an even split, which was really fucking sad. Futility, they name was Winchester.

This was a really dead town. Not as in living dead, which would have been reasonably interesting. No, dead as in nothing ever happened here, and there was nothing to do. The main street was a virtual ghost town - the only things still open were a grocery store, a liquor store, a pawn shop, and a really sad bar that should have been named Shitkickers. Would it kill Dad to move them somewhere more fun, like New York or New Orleans? Why was it always these tree infested places? Not that he had anything against nature - it was pretty when it wasn't actively trying to kill you. But going to a place with a nightlife that wasn't bats and raccoons would have been super.

He searched his jacket pockets for his flask, and found his holy water one first. A second search turned up the one with semi-decent vodka in it, and he let it warm him all the way down to his toes. He didn't much care for vodka, but it was a great disinfectant, and even better for feeling warm. No wonder the Russians loved it.

Dean wondered why they named this little piece of nothing Five Mile Road. It wasn't even a full mile. Could you sue a street for false advertising? Maybe it was the fifth mile of ... something. What? Logging road? Except it went on well past this road, although only when it was dry. When it was wet and full of sinkholes, it had the chain across the end, like now. Dean was willing to bet the logging company that donated this forest did it because it was too much of a pain in the ass to log. It wasn't suited for the purpose, so it became a tax dodge, which surely pleased its board.

What, him cynical? Never.

He was taking another swig of vodka when a woman's scream split the night. Dean was running for the trees before he realized it, swapping his flask for his gun. That was not a scream of laughter, or even a startled scream - that was a blood curdling one, one that reeked of terror so strongly Dean could almost smell it. His adrenaline kicked him into overdrive. Was Sam in danger?

It could be totally unrelated to him. It was a fairly sizable make out spot, and there was no reason to think that just because Sam was around here somewhere, it was somehow related to him.

But Dean was well aware of Winchester luck. Which meant he was probably right in the middle of it.

Son of a bitch. Was a quiet night too much to ask for?

* * *

The flashlights were abandoned almost immediately, although Sam was dying to tell Lia it didn't matter, because the dead could always find the living. They didn't need lights. They could feel life, just like some psychics could feel death. There was no hiding from a ghost.

But doubt was gnawing at the back of Sam's mind. That wasn't a ghost. There was no way in hell it was.

Even if it was a poltergeist, which it would have to be to manipulate solid objects so lethally, there was something more peaceful ghosts had in common with the violent ones, and that was, whenever you passed through one, it was a feeling like no other. It was like being very quickly dipped in liquid nitrogen. You were a solid road of goosebumps, from head to toe, and sometimes you shuddered for up to a minute. It felt a little like sudden onset hypothermia. And he should know, because he'd had ghosts grab for him, had had one pass through him. And it didn't need to pass through your entire body. Just a hand would be enough, a finger, maybe even a brush past your hair. When his kick went through the ghost's arm, he should have felt that. The cold should have been so bad he would have sworn he'd never felt warm in his entire life. Except it didn't. It felt like nothing. There was no sense of presence, no aura of cold, nothing. He bet if he'd brought an EMF meter, it wouldn't have made a sound. So what the hell had that been?

Running in the dark was bad enough. Running in a dark, overgrown forest was a thousand times worse. Everything grabbed at you, snagged you, tried to trip you, and trees which were as stationary an object as you could get seemed to still move abruptly into your limited vision. As soon as Sam stopped searching his mind for what possible thing that could have been, he realized he and Lia had been going away from the road, which seemed like a bad move, and in fact, he had no idea where they were. "Stop," he said, grabbing her arm and pulling her to a halt behind the thick trunk of a towering pine.

"What?" she asked, looking around nervously. He could feel she was shaking.

"Do you know where we're going?"

Sam had limited night vision, but he could still see her staring at him like he was crazy. "What? No. A psycho just killed Brian! I mean, I didn't like him, but he didn't deserve that."

"Yeah, I know. But we need to think before we get ourselves lost. That will only help the ... psycho." He almost said ghost, even though he knew that wasn't right. But he didn't know what else to call it.

"I need to find my sister," Lia said, her voice pitched to a whisper. "We need to get out of here."

"I know, I agree, but -"

There was rustling off towards their right, and Sam turned and pulled out his knife, taking up a fighting stance. Okay, so, he couldn't kick it, and he didn't have iron, but maybe a metal blade would do something. It was worth a shot.

But it was Antonio who came stumbling out of the woods, breathless and clumsy. "Holy shit," he gasped, still trying to catch his breath. Did he have asthma? Oh shit. Sam really hoped he didn't have asthma. "Was that some kind of elaborate, really tasteless practical joke? Please tell me it was."

Lia looked back hopefully. Sam wasn't a hundred percent sure that was where they'd come from. It was extremely easy to get turned around in the woods in the dark. "Could it have been? You don't think he and Becky staged that, did you?"

"I'm sorry, guys, but that was no joke." Sam knew the smell of blood and death all too well. You could fake some things, but never quite that.

Antonio had straightened up, but he was close enough that Sam could see his complexion had gone ashen. "How do you know?"

Should he tell them? Could he tell them without having them flee from him like he was a total psycho too? "I got some blood flicked on me, okay? I know."

"You tried to fight him, didn't you?" Antonio said. "Why the hell did you do that?"

"If it's that or die, I'd rather fight."

Antonio shook his head. "Running away's great too."

There was a noise in the brush, and they all quieted, looking towards the sound. Several seconds crawled by, each one feeling like it was loaded with dread. But when it didn't recur, Sam assumed it was some night animal that was upset by all the noise near it.

Sam opened his mouth to say something, when a booming voice suddenly yelled, "Sam!" Lia jumped and grabbed his arms as a gunshot rang out, making Antonio duck, like he thought they were coming their way. They weren't.

"Who the hell is that?" Lia whispered.

Sam felt a knot in his chest loosen a little. "That's my brother." He was never so glad for Dean and his smothering mother hen act.

"The psycho?" Lia asked. She sounded simultaneously terrified and relieved.

"He's not a psycho," Sam finally said. It felt like a huge admission.

"He's so fucking hot," Antonio said, with a note of despair. "Why are all the hot ones so damaged? Or dumb. Although I don't mind dumb so much."

"You should," Lia told him.

Sam was confused. Was Antonio gay? He didn't have a problem with it, he just didn't know that. It would make sense, because Lia seemed to befriend all the school's misfits ... like him. Like Sam "Psycho's Brother" Winchester. Oh goddamn it. He was a pity invite, wasn't he? She didn't really like him like that - she felt bad for him.

Sam shoved that aside to brood about later. He had to live through this before he could be depressed.

There was another gunshot, and Antonio asked, "Who's shooting? Does he have a gun?"

Sam didn't know if he meant did Dean have a gun or did Jason have a gun. But he said, "It's Dean." He would swear he recognized the sound of his .45, which was both impossible, and incredibly fucking sad.

"Why does your hot psycho brother have a gun?" Antonio asked. "Oh wait, I just heard what I said. Never mind."

Sam scowled at him, but he didn't know if Antonio caught it or cared.

"Sam!" Dean bellowed, and it had an edge to it now. An _"I'm going to kill every evil motherfucker I see"_ edge that meant he had probably found Brian's body. If they thought Dean was psycho simply for punching his way through half the football team, wait until they saw how he got when he thought Sam was in actual danger. No one would make eye contact with him ever again.

It would give away their location, but he wanted Dean to find them. He probably had salt, iron, holy water, every goddamn weapon he could carry, because he was paranoid like that, and right now Sam was never so glad that he was. "We're down here, we're okay!" He shouted, making both Lia and Antonio jump. "I think it's a poltergeist!" Although that still didn't feel right, he felt Dean should at least have some head's up on what was out here.

But the millisecond after he said it, he realized his error. Both Lia and Antonio were staring at him in slack jawed shock. "What the hell did you just say?" Antonio asked first. "Did you say poltergeist?"

"Umm ... it's a long story."

"Do you think Brian was killed by a ghost?" Lia asked.

Okay, yeah, he was never living this down. Maybe it was better if he let Jason kill him. "Technically, ghosts and poltergeists are different. They're both undead spirits, but poltergeists are way nastier, and usually want to take revenge on the living. Ghosts often have more of a reason for their violence." If they were going to think he was crazy, he may as well give them a damn good reason for it.

Antonio laughed breathlessly. "Oh god, it runs in the family."

Sam felt like he should be accustomed to being called crazy by now. But for some reason, it still stang.

* * *

"Sam!"

The first thing Dean encountered in the dark was a guy dressed like Jason from the Friday the 13th movies. Of all the things he was prepared to see, this had never even come close to crossing his mind. "Jumping the Halloween season, hey bud?"

He didn't answer. He turned in Dean's direction and lifted what looked like a bloody machete. Oh great, he was going to make him prove he was serious.

Dean fired a warning shot, but Jason didn't react at all, so Dean shot his arm, the one holding the machete. And it passed through him harmlessly and embedded itself in a tree trunk.

Ghost? No way. He didn't feel cold, for one, and it wasn't the vodka or the sprint. Ghost cold got through, no matter the ambient temperature. Also, since when did ghosts adopt the guise of a horror movie monster? Honestly, he wished they would. It would have made for some variety. "What the fuck are you supposed to be?" he asked, reaching in his pocket for his holy water flask. Probably wouldn't do anything, but it never hurt to try.

Before he got the cap off, Jason winked out of existence. He was there, and suddenly he wasn't. It was like reality blinked. Ghosts sometimes did that, but again - not a ghost. But somebody sure wanted him to think it was.

He took a couple of tentative steps forward, looking around for cameras or sigils or anything that might explain this, when the wind shifted and he caught a smell that curdled his stomach: death.

Death was a lot of things. Mainly blood and shit, but there was other stuff mixed in, and it was disgusting and there was no way in hell to accurately duplicate it. Dumping blood and shit on a floor wouldn't be enough. There was something else to it, something that was impossible to describe, but you knew it when you smelled it. It haunted your dreams, that's how distinctive and awful it was.

Ice filled Dean's veins, and he had a death grip on his gun as he followed the scent to a small clearing at the top of a gradual incline, and found a teenager face first on the ground, his skull split open and some of his brains oozing out slowly. The ground was black with blood. He knew it wasn't Sam, because he was too big - clearly, this was a jock boy - and he didn't own the kind of jacket this dude was wearing, but he didn't like this at all. Whoever had attacked was at least smart enough to get rid of the biggest one first. "Sam!" If Sam was hurt, he was going to burn this whole fucking forest down.

Dean searched the dark, but it was all trees and unforgiving darkness. There were odd shapes, but no movement besides an inconstant breeze rattling branches.

"We're down here, we're okay!" Sam shouted. It was hard to judge by sound alone, but he was a few hundred yards further on, maybe? "I think it's a poltergeist!"

Dean shook his head reflexively, even though there was no way Sam could see him. Poltergeist was as good a guess as any, but he'd never heard of a case where a poltergeist wasn't confined to a structure of some sort. Unless they were dealing with a cursed object? But who would dump a cursed object out here in the middle of fucking nowhere? And when did that object get a chance to see Friday The 13th, Part 2? Jason's mother was actually the killer in the first movie - hey, he didn't know a lot, but he knew his cheesy horror movies.

Dean could feel his temper ebbing, which was for the best, and he lessened his death grip on his gun. There was still something out here that needed its ass kicked, but he'd figure it out once he got Sam out of here. Maybe their Dad would have some idea of what they were dealing with.

Dean was half way down the incline when he heard the growling. It was monstrous. More like a bear growling than anything else, but louder - in stereo. No, total surround sound.

Dean raised his gun to the darkness and started looking. It took a moment, but finally he saw them - eyes in the dark. Glowing an inhuman yellowish gold, and his first terrible thought was the yellow eyed demon, whom they still didn't know how to kill. Dean could empty an entire clip in his head and he might not even notice.

But his initial spike of fear calmed down when he saw another set of yellow eyes, and another. And another on top of that. There wasn't more than one of those bastards.

But shapes seemed to be forming in the dark, and he was able to make out a wolf like ... thing. It wasn't a proper wolf, it was way too big, and seemed to be irregularly formed, like it had some kind of scoliosis that made its back a hump. This seemed to be true of all four of them he could see. They were vaguely wolfish creatures. Could they be werewolves? It wasn't a full moon, and he'd never seen werewolves that looked like this before, but ... maybe? Dean slowly moved his hand to a coat pocket, and felt for his silver bullet stash. How many did he have? He hadn't made any ages, which now seemed like a tremendous oversight. He always meant to, but something always popped up.

He had three silver bullets. Son of a bitch. Well, taking out most of them was still better than taking out none.

Dean moved slowly, carefully, as they were closing in almost as slowly. Just predators watching one another, waiting to see who made the first move. It was difficult to load bullets while never looking at them, but this what Dad drilled him for, right? He could assemble weapons blindfolded, which always seemed ridiculously excessive to him, but Dad had his reasons, even if he didn't make them clear to Dean.

He'd just about had the bullets loaded up when that woman screamed again, a startling noise that made him jump. And the wolf monsters weren't pleased by it either.

Because they picked that moment to attack.


	3. Wreck and Survive

**_3 -Wreck and Survive_**

There was a time when Dean thought the hardest thing he ever learned was how to take a punch.

You weren't going to win every fight - that was a given. And sometimes, on the way to winning a fight, you were going to get the shit kicked out of you. So you had to learn how to take a punch, take a beating, play through the pain, and most importantly, have these responses become automatic. You needed to be able to keep fighting, even though you had blood in your eyes, even though your consciousness was spinning, even though the pain was so bad you just wanted to give up and die. You had to burn it into muscle memory. Dean learned. It seemed to take forever, and he lost a couple of teeth, broke some ribs and some fingers, suffered minor internal bleeding and at least one concussion, but he got there. He got to the point where his first response, even when rising out of a dead sleep, was to fight. That was a thousand times harder than learning to take a punch.

But the worst thing? Having to take a monster attack. There were times when it couldn't be stopped. Sometimes you couldn't fend off the monsters. Sometimes it was going to get to you before you could kill it. The most important rule was survive. Survive to kill it, survive to fight another day. But all the dead could tell you it was much easier to say than do.

Dean hadn't had a bunch of time, but he knew he wouldn't be able to outrun these wolf things, even if they weren't werewolves. They were too close, and it would be a waste of energy best left to fighting and surviving. But even though these rangy, weird ass werewolves seemed to be upon him in two bounds, he had enough time to take aim and put a silver bullet right between the eyes of one of these ugly fuckers.

To no effect.

His mind was still grasping that - how? They couldn't be werewolves then. But a head shot at close range should have had some effect, even if it just made it pause for a second - when the one he shot lunged for his neck. Muscle memory kicked in, and he got his arm up to protect his throat, so its long ivory teeth sunk into his forearm like a hundred knives. At the same time, one of them sank its teeth into his thigh, and he screamed with the pain as he went down, the wolf beasts dragging him to the earth and ripping at his skin. He kicked one, but either he missed, or there was no substance to them whatsoever. He must have missed a point blank kick, which would have been embarrassing, but he had no actual time to worry about that.

Despite this, Dean still had a hold of his gun, and managed to get off one more shot before it finally fell from his numb fingers. Again, he hit the wolf, and again, it had no effect. It seemed to go through it, but there was no blood, no wound, no nothing. Like they were ghost wolves. Which was crazy.

A third wolf was going for his left hand, but he'd managed to retrieve his knife, and stabbed it right in its big yellow eye. Dean felt no resistance as the knife seemed to slide through air and buried itself deep in the ground. Although most of his mind was concerned with the fact that his skin and muscles were being torn by monsters, and the pain was molten and indescribable, a small corner of his mind was wondering, "What the fuck ..?" This made no sense at all.

As if his utter disbelief in their reality wished them to the cornfield, the beasts suddenly disappeared. The pain went nowhere, though, and he sat up swallowing a scream, trying to survey the damage. His right forearm had a large gash in it, and was bleeding a lot, but it didn't look arterial, so that was the one bit of good luck. As for his thigh, it had a piece missing, but, again, missed the artery. Everything was coming up Dean, except the part where he was attacked by a pack of ghost werewolves. A mixed blessing, then.

The wounds burned like they had poison in them, and he wondered if they did. That would be the cherry on this shit sundae.

"Dean!" Sam shouted, suddenly appearing from the trees. He ran out of the dark and came to a dead stop next to him, dropping to his knees to see how badly he was hurt. His complexion went deathly pale, making Dean wonder if he was downplaying the severity of his own injuries.

"What the hell were those?" Sam asked, taking off his coat. Dean was about to ask about that, but then Sam used his knife to cut off a sleeve of his shirt. At least emergency triage was trained into both of them.

"I don't know. Something weird is going on here."

"Tell me about it." Sam attempted to bind the wound on Dean's forearm, but the thin cloth was soaked in blood almost instantly. So not arterial, but motherfucking bad all the same.

Two other kids appeared, a cute girl who looked almost elfin, and a handsome Latino kid. The girl went ashen upon seeing Dean, and clapped her hands over her mouth like she might throw up, and the other kid looked exactly like Dean felt - so deeply confused it was almost painful. "What the fuck just happened?" he asked.

Dean shook his head, and made himself slightly dizzy, so he stopped. "Your guess is as good as mine."

Sam made a face at the bandage that wasn't cooperating. He looked around, and went up the incline, back towards the dead boy. When he came back, he had a blood splattered backpack. He started digging through it while Dean found his phone in his pocket, and thought about calling Dad. Somehow he wasn't surprised he had no signal. It was kind of spotty out here at the best of times.

"Jackpot," Sam said, pulling out a roll of athletic tape. Not as good as duct tape, but it might hold him together better at this point.

"Are you calling nine-one-one?" the girl asked. She was probably Lia.

Dean closed his phone and put it back in his pocket. "I wouldn't even if I could get a signal. All the cops would do is get killed."

"As opposed to us?" she replied. Good point.

Dean winced as Sam wrapped the tape tightly around the gash on his arm. Blood was still oozing out, and it was now throbbing like a second heartbeat, but it was better than nothing. Because his lightheaded feeling wasn't going away, he took a swig from his vodka flask, and then, mostly because he still wasn't sure if there was something in the ghost wolves bites, took a swig from his holy water flask too. Couldn't hurt; might help.

"Can you stand?" Sam asked.

"Let's find out," Dean said, and allowed Sam to help him back on his feet. His right leg, the one with a chunk of it missing, hurt so much it almost buckled instantly, and Dean saw spots bloom and explode before his eyes. Oh wow, that was not good at all. He leaned on Sam until he could stand without falling over, and Sam got a look at his leg wound. "Dean, you need a hospital," he said.

Dean snickered, because it was funny. "Yeah, well, I don't think Jason and his ghost wolves are going to give us compassionate leave."

"Are those things related?" the Latino kid asked.

Dean shrugged, as Sam found a t-shirt in the backpack, and tried to stuff it into the wound in his leg before wrapping tape around it. It was a nice try, but it wouldn't last long. Dean could see his right hand was shaking like a son of a bitch, and the likelihood that he could use it in a fight was ridiculously low. Yeah, he was screwed. "I think so. They're all behaving like ghosts, except they're not ghosts."

"How do you know they're not ghosts?" Lia asked. She still looked a bit greenish around the gills.

"You didn't tell them?" Dean asked Sam.

Sam shrugged, as he used the last of the tape on Dean's leg. Blood was already seeping through. "They already think I'm crazy enough."

Dean fixed the kids with an intense stare. "Okay, we're monster hunters. I know that sounds crazy, but explain this shit without the existence of monsters." He looked between them, giving them a few seconds to mull it over. They honestly looked terrified of him, but that was okay with Dean. It meant when he told them to do something, they'd probably do it. "Give up? Good. Ghosts bring cold spots with them. Did anyone notice the temperature drop twenty degrees before Chad there was attacked?"

"Brian," Lia said.

"Whatever. Did you?"

Both kids shook their heads no.

"Okay," Dean said. "Not a ghost."

Sam wiped his bloody hands on his jeans. It didn't really help. "But they're non-corporeal, like ghosts, and can do major damage."

"And can't be shot or stabbed," Dean said. "At least not with silver or conventional metals."

"This doesn't make sense, Dean."

"No shit."

"What do we do?" Lia asked. She looked like she was on the verge of tears.

God, how was he going to protect all these kids when he could barely stand up, and only had one fully functioning arm? The Dad in his head said ," _Suck it up and find a way."_ It wasn't very helpful. The Dad in his head mostly scolded him, which honestly didn't say anything good about his relationship with his Dad, but that was something to think about when he was sure he would survive the night. "The best bet we have is to get to the road. Maybe this thing is confined to the forest, and won't follow us out of the trees."

"But what if it's not?" Sam asked.

Dean shrugged. "Then we fight it out in the open, where it can't hide from us. At least that gives us a territorial advantage."

"Fight them with what?" Sam asked. It was a damn good question. "You couldn't hurt them with weapons, I couldn't hurt them physically ... at this point we're waiting for it to regroup and kill us off one by one."

"No we're not," Dean snapped, a little disappointed him. He'd taught him better than that. "If you think we've lost this fight already, just kill yourself, because that's the same goddamn thing. We're not beaten yet." Except they completely were. But he didn't want Sam to give in to despair. If the thing could hurt them, there had to be a way they could hurt it. They simply didn't know what that was yet. "Now how many people are out here?"

Sam scrubbed a hand through his hair, and left streaks of blood in it. "There was Jayna, Gabby, Tom, Felicia and Becky as well as us."

Shit! He could not walk the forest gathering up that many kids, if they were all still alive. A bit of a big if at this point. "We'll find who we can. Then we have to try and get out of here. Sam, get my gun."

It was on the ground, not far from him, but Dean had a feeling if he bent down to get it, he was hitting the ground and staying there. Adrenaline was keeping him upright, but he knew shock was probably right around the corner. When that happened, he'd be useless.

Sam picked it up, and held it out to him butt first, but Dean shook his head, and Sam's eyes widened. He now knew Dean meant for him to take his gun and keep it, because Dean knew he might check out at some point. He wasn't leaving Sam unarmed if that happened. Besides, he had a spare gun. Dean rarely headed out with just one gun and one knife.

"How did those wolf things disappear?" Lia asked. "I mean, they just showed up and just vanished. Was there a reason to it?"

There was something. Although it didn't make a whole lot of sense, Dean tried to tease it out. "I wasn't falling for the Jason thing, but my bullets didn't hurt it. So it winked out, and then these wolf things showed up ..."

"To hurt you," Sam said. "Jason was meant for us. The wolves were meant for you."

"What?" The Latino kid exclaimed. "It's personalizing the terror? Does that mean I'm about to be attacked by a thing that looks like my dad?"

Dean pondered that. Sam may have had a point. But what the hell did that mean? "I dunno. The wolves disappeared after my knife went through them without hitting anything, although I don't think the knife was helpful at all."

"Or they disappeared after drawing blood," Sam said. "A lot of blood." The way Sam was looking at him, Dean imagined he'd actually changed the words. He wanted to say "after mortally wounding you", but settled for blood. It was kind of him.

Dean pulled out his flask, and had another swallow. Booze might help stave off the shock, at least for a little while. It also might not, but Dean had to take some chances. It killed Brian, and tried to kill him, and may have succeeded - they were going to have to see. Strategically, it was a good move. Take out the two most likely to put up a decent fight. Leave the rest. For what?

It must have showed on his face, because Sam's look shaded to alarmed. "What?"

"I don't think it wants you all dead," Dean said.

Sam paled. That hadn't occurred to him.

"That's good, isn't it?" Lia asked, looking between the two of them, clearly confused.

"It depends on what they want us for," Sam said. And now everyone looked queasy.

Dean took another belt of vodka. He was going to kill this son of a bitch before he died if it was the last thing he did.

* * *

Sam knew Dean was guessing, like all of them. There were few facts on the ground, and all they had was speculation. But his gut was telling him Dean was right. Whatever this thing was, it didn't want them all dead. But who did they want, and what for? If they could narrow it down, maybe they could build a half-assed strategy around it.

As it was, Sam only wanted to get to the road and fast, because Dean wasn't going to make it for too much longer. He was losing way too much blood, and the fact that he hadn't collapsed in shock yet was a testament to both his stubbornness and his alcoholism. To prove that point, Dean lead the way on their search for anyone else. He found a stripped branch to use as a walking stick, so he didn't have to put too much pressure on his right leg, which was for the best. But Sam absolutely hated that he gave him his main gun. It meant Dean was already writing himself off. He assumed they might have to leave him behind at some point. Sam wasn't leaving him behind. He didn't care if he had to drag him out, he would. Dean wasn't dying here.

But what about the rest of them? Sam was hoping against hope it wasn't something that wanted him. Was it selfish to think that, or paranoid? Maybe a bit of both. It just seemed so many things were after the Winchesters, and clearly it wanted Dean dead, so he was the only one left. Well, except for their Dad, but he wasn't in the vicinity.

Could this be related to their Dad somehow? Somebody trying to get at John Winchester through his kids? It wouldn't be the first time, nor the last, if they made it through tonight.

Antonio and Lia were still trying to be silent, but Dean wasn't, and Sam knew what that meant. it meant Dean didn't think stealth mattered; it meant he thought this thing - whatever it was - could find them whenever it wanted. There was no proof for that, but Sam didn't doubt it. Supernatural entities had ways of finding people.

The first two they found were Jayna and Gabby, who were still together, and hiding reasonably well. Gabby was crying and finding it difficult to stop, so Dean gave her a swig from his flask, and assured her he and Sam were going to get them out of here, which broke Sam's heart a little. He was a dad, even though he wasn't. Sam wished he was bigger, so he could take their Dad out back and beat the shit out of him. No wonder Dean was an alcoholic. Who wouldn't crumble under all that weight?

Much like the other attacks, there was no warning. They were walking and suddenly hands reached up from the ground and grabbed them by the legs, pulling them down. Sam shot the ones that had him, for all the good that did, and then the zombies came.

They were straight up horror movie zombies - rotted flesh on exposed skeletons, missing jaws and exposed guts, and Sam went for head shots, but it did no good. They were ghost zombies, which made no sense at all. Sam imagined they'd smell terrible, as rotted as they were, but there was no smell at all. So much of this didn't add up, he didn't know where to start.

They had grabbed Gabby and were trying to pull her deeper into the woods. Jayna grabbed her arm, but hands had her legs, trying to pull her down. Sam was out of bullets, but considering how useful they were, it didn't matter. Attempting to the stab the hands did no good either. How could they be solid enough to hold them, but not be hurt?

Suddenly light bloomed bright, and Dean said, "Eat it raw, assholes!" He'd turned his walking stick into a torch, and the instant he jabbed it at the zombies, they disappeared in a swirl of smoke. Waving it at the hands seemed to have much the same effect.

"How did you know that would work?" Sam asked, amazed.

"I didn't," Dean admitted. "But what else was left?"

The zombies had scratched up Gabby's arm pretty good, but it wasn't too bad. She wasn't going to need stitches. She still looked stricken when she asked, "I'm not going to turn into a zombie now, am I?"

"No, you'll be fine," Sam told her. He didn't point out they weren't real zombies because it seemed pointless and petty. She was scared, and she had never dealt with monsters being real before. In all honesty, they were doing well for civilians.

Dean leaned back hard against a near by trunk, trying and failing to make a stumble look casual. His right pant leg was now black with blood, and in the light from his makeshift torch, his face was so pale his eyes looked bruised. He wasn't going to make it much longer. Dean being Dean, he'd use up all his strength, and eventually collapse, to never get up again. It was strength or insanity - pick your poison there. It all added up the same.

Sam cupped his hands around his mouth, and shouted, "Hey! Tell us what you want! We'll make a deal!"

Dean looked alarmed. "What the hell are you doing?"

"We're sitting ducks out here. Maybe if we see who we're actually dealing with, we'll know how to fight him."

"And why would he bargain? He's holding all the cards. We have no leverage."

Sam opened his mouth to reply, but stopped, and looked out into the woods. There was a building sigh, like a gust of wind through a narrow canyon, and it suddenly blew down on them like someone turned on the air conditioning.

It was just a strong enough gust to put out Dean's torch. But before Sam could curse their general terrible luck, Dean gasped and grabbed his left arm, dropping the now extinguished branch.

Sam went to him, furious. If this motherfucking bastard didn't stop hurting Dean, he was going to ... well, he didn't know. He'd think of something appropriately terrible. But before he could ask him what was wrong, he found Dean staring confounded at his own arm. Sam soon joined him.

What he initially took for scars were words, scratched on to Dean's skin. _You have to stop him._ As they watched, the scratches faded and disappeared from Dean's arm, as suddenly as they arrived.

He and Dean shared a look, before they both said the exact same thing. "What the fuck ..?"

How the hell was everything getting constantly weirder?


	4. Mapped By What Surrounded Them

_**4 - Mapped By What Surrounded Them**_

Pain woke John up. It was on his left hand side, and even the painkillers hadn't been hard enough to cushion it for long. A broken rib probably, which was a bastard, because those took forever to heal.

He stumbled to bathroom, where he took a couple more pills with lukewarm tap water that tasted like blood. In the mirror, he saw the stitches Dean had made, and was duly impressed. Tight, neat, even. Any emergency room nurse would have been proud. Hell, it was a lot better than the last ones he got from a doctor. In the back of his mind, he could almost hear Mary saying, , _"Oh good, you've taught our son the fun hobby of stitching his own father back together. Way to go, John."_

She wouldn't have been wrong, either. He'd had the best of intentions, and, like the old cliché always claimed, they did lead straight to hell. This whole trip to Greenridge, he'd hoped it would mend some fences. The boys were not only growing up but away from him, but he was starting to get a very clear sense of now or never. Which turned out so much more true than he ever could have imagined.

He had no idea that there was something of a demon underground in Aberdeen, but when he did, he had to take it on alone. Dean would have been a huge help, but then he might have found out the truth about Sam, which he wasn't willing to tell him yet. Was John ever going to tell him? He supposed he'd have to eventually, but he was putting it off until he absolutely had to. How did he tell him Sammy was tainted with demon blood, and oh yeah, Azazel had "plans" for these kids? John had spent a couple nights up wondering, if worse came to worst, and Sam went full demon ... could he kill him? Could he pull the trigger on his own son?

There were days he liked to think he could, but more days he was sure he couldn't. The funny thing was, Sammy seemed to be trying to make it easier. He was a teenager, and they were all sulky, moody pains in the asses, but Sam was building up this huge chip on his shoulder like someone had dared him to see how big he could make it. During another pointless fight with him, John almost told him that Dean wasn't like this when he was his age, and the thought stopped him dead in his tracks. _"You weren't there,"_ the Mary in his brain hissed. _"You don't know what Dean was like at Sam's age."_

John wanted to protest this. Of course he was around when Dean was fifteen. They went wendigo hunting in the Rockies, for one, and then there was that ghost at the Marin estate, and the ghoul who had taken up residence in that cemetery in Castle Rock. Dean, the hard worker who was always eager to impress him ... and never really showed him his true self, did he? Dean was obedient, resourceful, and one hell of a fighter, who always wanted to make him proud. But what was he like, really? Who was he? John didn't honestly know. Dean showed his best face to him, the father approved face, and that was all.

Sammy was surly and snarky, a resentful little know it all who was, to be brutally honest, a shocking reminder of who John was at his age, save for the know it all part. But Dean was a self-effacing yet macho cipher. And when he allowed himself to think about it, it hit him like a fist. What had he done to him? Had he asked too much of him, and Dean had never figured out a way to say no? It hurt even more when he realized how much of Mary he could see in Dean. The eyes mostly. They even seemed haunted in the same exact way.

Sometimes John wanted to apologize to him, but he didn't know how. It was too late for that anyways, wasn't it? The damage was done. And now he had to look at Sammy and wonder if he was going to become the enemy. He was trying to find a way to stop it - a counter spell, something to completely purge demon blood - but so far he was coming up snake eyes. Whatever Azazel had done to Sam, it was most likely permanent. Now what? What was the next brilliant move here, Einstein? It kept him up nights. He had to save Sammy, and he didn't know how. The absolute minimum you should expect from a father was he would keep his sons safe. He wasn't sure he could. He had failed them, and was in the constant process of failing them. Why else was he so hard on Dean? Dean had to save Sammy - or kill him - if John could not. There was no other way.

There was a genuine psychic in Tacoma named Mireena. He'd seen her the other day, asking about the future for his boys. Mireena liked to use Tarot cards.

People who didn't really know Tarot always assumed the Death card was the worst, but it wasn't. It was metaphorical, not literal; as cards went, it was actually relatively benign. No, the worst card in the deck was The Tower. Traditionally, it was depicted as a castle being split by lightning, while people fell off the parapet on their way to certain death. It was ruination in card form, apocalyptic, monstrous. The destruction of your life and all you knew. You never wanted to get The Tower, because no good came of it. Even reversed, it was a horrible card.

The Tower popped up in Sammy's future. When John saw it, he winced. It wasn't a confirmation he'd turn evil, but it was a confirmation his life would be cursed. He wouldn't escape. So what did John do for him now? Was there anything that made it easier? Mireena couldn't tell him. She did mention, as kindly as possible, that Sam's future was a shapeless nightmare she couldn't quite grasp the scale of, because she'd never seen cards so uniformly horrible before. His reading was a hellscape.

He did have an ally in his corner: The Knight of Swords. John didn't need Mireena to interpret that - that was Dean. At least he would be with his brother when all the shit went down. His future seemed no better, although she said Dean seemed to have a guardian angel that she didn't think was Sam. She didn't know who it was. Curious, but John figured it might have been Bobby or something. He really liked the boys.

Speaking of which, he was going to have to drop the boys off at Bobby's house. He didn't want to, especially because Bobby was being an ass, but everything John got out of that demon tonight was fucking disturbing. Azazel was supposedly looking for "his kids", and plans were "in motion", but the demon refused to say much more about either. The boys would be safer with Bobby until he could figure out if Azazel's plans were immediate or part of a longer scheme. Mireena seemed to think longer, but she threw enough doubt on it he wanted to get hands on confirmation. So much for being together as a family.

He wondered if, one day, the boys would forgive him. He wondered if he'd deserve it.

It was so quiet in the house, John thought it must have been late, but a check of the clock told him it was only about ten to midnight. Kind of odd, but not necessarily. If Sammy was sleeping, and Dean had gone out to carouse, the house would be tomb quiet.

John went out to get something to eat, because he was hungry in spite of the deep aches that made his body feel like it was full of broken glass, and he got this weird feeling in the hallway. He peeked into Dean's room, and wasn't shocked to find it empty, the bed made as if no one had slept on it within the last twenty four hours. Wherever they went, Dean always had rooms that felt like shrines to missing people. John wasn't sure if he was afraid to truly inhabit the space because they'd most likely be leaving soon, or if Dean didn't want to leave a trace he'd ever been here. Dean lived his life waiting for the next disaster. John imagined that was his fault, but once again, he didn't know how to fix it.

He checked on Sammy, who always had more lived in rooms. Someone was here, even if they were neater than your average teenage boy. For a moment, he thought Sam was sleeping, but before he closed the door, he realized something was off. He wasn't sure what, but as he stepped closer to the bed, he realized it was a decoy. He tasted a sour burst of adrenaline in the back of his throat. Why were both boys gone?

There was a note on top of a book on Sammy's nightstand, and John picked it up and read it. Oh thank god, it was just a note from a girl. Not a ransom or something. Did Dean go with him? There was no way in hell Sammy would have agreed to that, because Dean was getting the surly teen treatment too. Did Sam sneak out, and Dean follow? That seemed more plausible.

But that uneasy feeling had settled in his gut, and refused to go away. After what the demon told him, did he really want Sammy out, even if Dean was with him? No. He needed the boys with him, until he could safely get them to Bobby's.

He got dressed, and took a couple of swigs of whiskey to take the edge off the pain. It didn't really help, but he was hoping it was the thought that counted. John also hoped this was all innocent teenage fun, and he'd find Dean and Sam arguing over some stupid thing.

But he took no chances. He got his weapons before he got his coat.

* * *

"Was ... I swear there was writing on your arm," Lia said.

"Yeah, I thought so too," Dean said, showing her his now writing free left arm.

"Is this more ghost shit?" Antonio asked.

"Not normally," Sam said. He thought he'd read of ghosts occasionally leaving messages, writing on mirrors or walls, but it was extremely rare, and never done on skin. Of course, he hadn't read all of the case files, but Sam still had a lot of doubts about it. He looked at Dean. "What could do that?"

Dean shook his head. "No idea. This is all new to me."

"So what do we do now?" Lia asked.

Sam looked around, but there were no clues jumping out at him. They were stuck in the woods with some kind of monsters they'd never faced before, and Dean was still bleeding out. There were no good choices. "We head for the road. We try and force him - or her, whichever - to come out of hiding and face us."

"Oh yeah, throw ourselves in the mouth of the manticore and hope it chokes on some of us, so the rest of us get away? What a plan," Antonio said.

"Dungeons and Dragons?" Dean asked. It took Sam a moment to get what Dean was asking.

Antonio looked as surprised as he felt. "Yeah. You play?"

"No, but I've heard of it."

He had? That was news to Sam.

"I'm not going anywhere without my sister," Lia said.

Gabby looked at her like she was crazy. "We were attacked by zombies, Lia. Zombies! We need to get outta here before who knows what shows up."

"I don't wanna be that guy," Antonio said. "But do we think the others survived this?"

Lia's eyes were now burning with fury. "What?"

"I just mean -"

"Don't you dare -"

Dean whistled sharply, making everyone shut up. "Hey! I have a really terrible idea. Let's split up into groups, and head for the road from different places."

Sam wondered if he was delirious. "Splitting up is the worst thing we can do, Dean."

"Is it? From what little evidence we have, it can only throw one attack at a time."

Sam opened his mouth to argue, but then considered his point. "Right. Jason had to disappear before the wolves showed up."

"But the hands," Jayna said. "They showed up with the zombies."

"They were zombies too," Dean said. "It was all a single attack."

Yeah, he was right. The hands were caked with dirt, but clearly rotted.

"I'm not saying it isn't risky," Dean admitted. "'Cause it straight up is. But this motherfucker can kill the rest of us and take the designated survivors whenever it wants. Right now, it's playing with its food. How long until it gets bored?"

There was no answer to that. And it was one of the bleaker assessments Dean had ever treated Sam to, because Sam knew Dean tried to always look on the bright side for him. Why? Sam often found it maddening. Did he think he didn't see what was going on? Did he think he couldn't take it? But, to be fair, Sam often did find it comforting. Sometimes, when it was so dark, it was nice to have a sliver of light.

He needed one right now, in fact. Because he knew part of the reason Dean was saying this was because he was very close to tapping out. He was getting paler by the moment, and Sam wasn't sure he could actually stand up on his own anymore. This was a final hail mary on his part. Dean looked at him, and Sam gave him a slight nod, because he knew what it meant. Try and draw the monster to them, and away from everyone else. The whole point was to make themselves bait so the others could get away. Maybe it would work, maybe it wouldn't, but Sam wanted to at least try and get Dean out of here before he went into shock.

"We'll pair up," Sam said. "No one goes out alone."

"Do we get weapons?" Antonio asked.

"Have you ever fought with a knife before?" Dean asked him.

Antonio's eyes widened. "Are you crazy? No."

"Have you ever fired a gun?"

"Does a paintball gun count?"

Dean shook his head. "No weapons, except any you want to improvise. Besides, if you've been paying attention, weapons aren't really working."

"Fire worked," Lia said. "Kinda."

"Grab branches. We can make some temporary torches," Dean said. "Let's just try not to burn the forest down. Unless it's all we've got left."

So that's what they did. They grabbed some branches and turned them into small but viable torches, and Dean gave Sam his lighter, because he wasn't even going to pretend he still had the fine motor skills necessary to use it. When Sam took the lighter, he couldn't help but notice Dean's hand was ice cold. It was probably amazing he'd made it this long.

Lia went off to look for her sister, and an exasperated Antonio followed her, while Gabby and Jayna decided to try and approach from a small trail about thirty feet away. Sam and Dean were simply going straight up from here. Once the girls were on their way, and out of earshot, Dean said, "You know what I'm going to say."

Sam glared at him. "I'm not leaving you here. Don't even try it."

"Kid, I am hangin' on by my fingernails. I'm not sure I can move."

"Tough shit. You're gonna have to."

Dean groaned, but didn't have much fight in him, which told you how bad he was. Sam hadn't bothered with a torch, because it was mainly to make the others feel better. If Sam was right, they would be the focus of the attack, and nothing was going to help them until they figured out what exactly they were dealing with. Sam tucked Dean's empty gun in Dean's jacket pocket. "I have more bullets," he said.

Of course Dean had more bullets. How he didn't constantly rattle was a mystery to Sam. "As you said, they're not doing much good, so might as well save them."

"I'm gonna slow you down. I'm a liability in a fight."

"Fuck you," Sam said, sliding his arm around Dean's shoulders.

"Such a potty mouth," Dean teased.

Sam didn't want to smile, but he almost did.

Dean leaned against him, and Sam wished he had worked out more, because he was almost too heavy for him. Also, he was way too cold, but that was part of shock and blood loss. Sam knew he had to keep him awake as long as possible, so as they started up the small incline, he said, "You've been monster hunting for what, ten years now?"

"More like twelve, maybe thirteen. I dunno. It feels like forever."

Sam bet it did. He also bet, if their positions were reversed, he'd be stark raving mad and unable to function in normal society. In fact, he had some questions about Dean in both cases, but now was not the time. ""And you've never come across anything like this?"

"Ghosts who aren't ghosts? No. Most monsters don't try and hide behind the ability of others ..."

Dean tailed off so abruptly that Sam thought he might have passed out, but no, he was still awake. He just had that look in his eye like he'd finally figured something out. "Magic."

"What?"

"It's magic. Fucking witches. I hate witches."

Sam pondered that. It was an interesting take. "But they couldn't have planted hex bags througout the entire forest."

"You're right. They didn't. This is someone with major league mojo. They don't need hex bags to fuck shit up."

"That's impossible, isn't it?"

"No. It's improbable and fucking rare as hell, which is why it didn't occur to me before. But yeah, I can see some major fucking asshole witch conjuring up fake spirits that are just tangible enough to do damage."

"What about the writing on your arm?"

"If they've got mojo, they could probably do that too, but I'll be damned if I know why. Throw us off the track?"

Sam wasn't sure about that. He felt like they were missing something, but he didn't know what. "Got anything that can kill a witch?"

"Beyond conventional weaponry? No."

"Dude, what the fuck? You're always prepared."

"I'm a hunter, not a Boy Scout."

"Is that why you don't have any badges?"

"I don't need no stinking badges," Dean said, snickering at his own joke. Sam let him have it without comment. He also realized his pant leg was now getting wet with Dean's blood. He wished it was the first time his brother had bled on him and ruined his clothes, but far from it. They all should have been laundry experts by now.

They had just about crested the rise when Dean fixed his eyes forward in his best death glare - undercut a bit by the glassiness - and said, "What the fuck do you want from us?"

Sam was wondering if Dean was now hallucinating when he finally saw who he was talking to. Hidden in the shadows of some tall evergreen was a person in a hooded dark cloak. It was impossible to see a face or any features. They were a part of the darkness as if they were born to it.

There was the sound of another breeze, and only after another moment did Sam realize they were words, so ghostly and evanescent you had to strain to hear them. "Not in control."

"What?" Sam asked, deeply confused now. Again, there should have come a point when the weirdness stopped happening. Why hadn't they come to it yet?


	5. Trying Not To Die

_**5 - Trying Not To Die**_

"If you're not in control of this, who the hell is?" Dean demanded. "Why are you even here?"

There was no answer. The thing in the cape just stood their, like an abandoned Halloween ornament. Sam was ready to believe it was, and felt his anxiety turning to annoyance.

The night was suddenly full of low, guttural growling, and the thing in the cloak was gone. Now red eyes appeared out of the dark - four sets of them. Sam was afraid the monster wolves had come back, but when they started to become visible as shapes, he realized they were far stranger. Not wolves- cats? Tigers maybe. Some kind of mutant big cat.

Sam left Dean leaning up against a tree, even though he said, "Don't you fucking dare!" Too late.

For a long time, Sam had had this recurring nightmare where he was the only Winchester left alive. Sometimes he was in whatever house they were currently staying in; sometimes it was in a place where the ground looked volcanic, bubbling with molten lava and fringed with cooled black rock. It didn't really matter the landscape - he was the only Winchester left alive. Dad was dead, Dean was dead. He'd never told anyone about it, because for a single second, he felt a kind of relief - no family! He could do anything! And then the reality would club him like a truncheon - no family! What was he supposed to do? He hated the feeling, and worse yet, it almost felt like prophecy.

Right now, he was fucking terrified. It felt like he was on the verge of a heart attack or a panic attack, whichever happened first. But if Dean wasn't leaving here alive, neither was Sam. Sure, logically he knew it was stupid, but he also knew he didn't much care.

Sam took out his knife and kept walking forward, intending to draw them all away from Dean, who was now cursing him out in the background. "Come and get me, you son of a bitch!" He yelled. Sam continued walking towards the big cats, because what the fuck, right? Nothing much to lose now. If he was going to die, he was going to die. Didn't make much difference if it was now or two minutes from now.

They attacked as one, and Sam attempted to stab one, well aware that it was hopeless. And then two things happened simultaneously: the knife went through the cat on his right like it was made of air, which it probably was. No harm was done to it. And a cat on the left bit his arm, needle teeth breaking the skin ...

... and then they were gone.

Sam staggered, caught of guard by the suddenness of it. His arm hurt a tiny bit, but it was like a sting. He looked, and he had impressions of teeth marks on his upper arm, and there were two pinpricks where fangs broke the skin, leaving tiny dots of blood. But nothing more.

"What the fuck happened?" Dean asked. He was slumped against the tree, looking more glassy eyed than ever. He might have thought he hallucinated it.

"I don't know." He really didn't. Sam was looking around for clues, maybe this was the prelude to another attack, but ... how did that make any sense at all? What was going on tonight?

Maybe it wasn't magic. Maybe the supernatural world had had a nervous breakdown, and everything was just spilling out of the veil with no rhyme or reason.

"What did you do?" a man's voice asked.

It sounded like it came from up ahead, on his right, but he couldn't immediately find the source. Finally, he caught movement in the shadows, and a gunshot rang out so fast it was only in immediate retrospect that Sam realized it was Dean who fired his gun. And when the bullet got close enough to the man, a green shield of energy seemed to pop up around him, which was a good thing, as the bullet hit the shield exactly between the eyes. A perfect head shot.

"Hey!" The guy snapped. "Don't try that shit again!"

The guy looked like one of the jocks Dean beat up. Oh shit, was he? Sam was relatively sure he was. He was a broad shouldered musclehead, probably no older than seventeen, with an angry burst of acne flaring red across the bridge of his nose, and an ornate bracelet on his right arm. A bracelet ..?

It had a faint green glow about it, like it was radioactive, and had a big red stone inset in the center. Sam really wanted to examine it, but couldn't from here. He wasn't going to approach him either. If Dean couldn't shoot through it, he sure as hell couldn't stab through it. "What did you do, pipsqueak?" the jock said. "Why'd you scare it off?"

"Scare what off?" Sam asked.

"You fucking idiot," Dean snapped. "That's a cursed object!"

"Fuck you, pretty boy!" The jock snapped. "I know you're fucking her, right? You took her away from me!"

"Who?" Dean asked, looking genuinely confused.

"Becky!"

"This is about Becky?" Sam replied. If you had told him one of their group was the focus of this attack, he'd have picked Becky last.

"She's fucking Brian, she's fucking you ... she's fucking everybody but me! What's wrong with me?"

"You're a fucking psychopath," Dean snapped. "I think that makes her a great judge of character."

The jock sneered at Dean, and held out his bracelet towards him. "Wanna die faster, faggot?"

"Hey!" Sam said, hoping to figure out exactly what the hell was going on. "Hold on a second. I don't understand ... why are you doing this?"

The jock scoffed. "What, you half-deaf from your psycho brother shooting everything? I just said."

"You're doing this for Becky?" Sam said, playing dumb. He had to keep this asshole talking, because at least he wasn't attacking anyone while he was flapping his gums.

"Yeah! She's supposed to be with me! Not Brian, not ... whoever the fuck you are," he said, waving his hand dismissively at Dean.

"Did you ask her to go out with you?" Dean asked.

"Of course!"

"And what did she say?"

The jock rolled his eyes so hard, Sam was surprised they didn't fall out of their sockets. "She said no, but she's confused."

Dean glared at him. He was now sitting on the ground, resting against the tree, his gun in his seemed casual and half-conscious, but Sam knew the millisecond a promising opening showed up, Dean would take that shot again. "No she's not. She gave you her answer. Move on."

The jock glared at him. "Fuck you!"

"What did you use to kill Brian?" Sam asked, trying to pull his attention away from Dean. He seemed more interested in killing him than Sam, probably because he didn't see him as a threat, which was fine with him. Sam wanted his threat to be a surprise.

"Are you blind too?" He tapped the bracelet. "This thing!"

"What's your name?"

He seemed dubious, but answered the question. "Craig."

"Okay, Craig, what the hell is that?"

"It's the amulet of Azul. Or something like that. The black eyed guy told me it would solve all my problems."

Sam's stomach dropped. "Black eyes?" A demon gave him that? Holy shit - there were demons in Greenridge?

"What black eyed guy?" Dean asked. It seemed like adrenaline had bought him a brief second wind. "Where?"

"At our pawn shop. I don't the guy's name, it was stupid like Allen or Alfred or something. Some weirdo passing through to Canada."

Craig was the son of the pawn shop owner? Okay, this was falling into place. But why would a demon drop off a cursed object? For what reason? Beyond the general demon motive of causing violence and chaos ... okay, yeah, the answer was right there. "What's the plan here, Craig?" Sam asked. "What are you gonna do?"

Craig now stared at him. His pale blue eyes were cold, but at the same time, a little crazed. Cursed objects could have both a weight and a price. It was doing things for him, sure, but what was it doing to him? Sam bet Craig had no idea. The demon probably left that out of his pitch. "I'm gonna take Becky, and we're gonna get the fuck outta here."

"And the plan was what, murder all her friends and family, so she'd feel indebted to you?" Dean snapped. Although a totally fair point, Sam really wished he stopped pulling Craig's focus back to him. Craig probably hated Dean before he got his hands on this object. Now he was dying to kill him.

"She's all I need, and I'm all she needs," Craig said. How much of that was illogical thinking, and how much of that was the influence of the object? Sam wished he could tell.

"Dude, you may as well rename yourself Bugs, because you're completely Looney Tunes." Dean replied.

"Azul!" Craig snapped, and the dark, robed figure appeared again, just off to the left side of Craig. "Finish him off!"

The figure started gliding towards Dean, and Sam stepped right in front of him. The figure stopped.

Sam could still see no face, no sense of the being under the robe. Was it human? He had some doubts.

"Why are you doing that?" Craig shouted at Azul. His eyes refocused on Sam. "What the fuck are you doing, you little shit? Why is it afraid of you?"

It was _afraid_ of him? Sam wished he could read that from the ... specter, or whatever it was attached to the amulet.

But some things were starting to make sense. This Azul - or whatever - was basically slaved to the amulet. It had to do whatever was commanded of it. But it didn't want to, hence the writing on Dean's arm, and the whispers in the wind. It was actually pleading for help. It too wanted to stop Craig, but for whatever reason, it couldn't. Maybe it couldn't act against the wishes of its master. "Craig, I need you to listen to me," Sam said, lowering his voice. He'd read that talking in a calm, measured tone could soothe someone who was acting irrationally. Of course, it might come off as patronizing too, so it was a thin line. "The amulet is a cursed object. Cursed objects always exact a price -"

"Twenty bucks."

"What?"

"I paid the guy twenty bucks for it," Craig said.

"No, that's not what I meant."

There was the sound of rustling, and people emerged from several feet away. It was Lia, Antonio, and Becky. Becky stopped dead upon seeing Craig. "You? What are you ..." She connected some dots, and her eyes widened. "Did you murder Brian?"

Sam suddenly knew what she was going to do, but wasn't close enough to stop her. Becky closed the distance between her and Craig in seconds, even Lia couldn't grab her in time, and she threw a punch at Craig. That green energy shield popped up again, protecting him, and Craig grabbed her arms as she continued trying to hit him, and shoved her away violently.

"Hey!" Dean snapped.

Becky hit the ground, but looked furious, and got up again very quickly. "You fucking bastard! He was your friend!"

"He was not my friend!" Craig shouted back at her. "A friend wouldn't ask out the girl he knew you were interested in! He was a fucking bastard, just like everyone else!"

"I don't like you, Craig! I've never liked you! You're a creep!"

"See, I said she was a good judge of character," Dean said, under his breath. Nobody heard it except Sam. But yes, she apparently was.

In the meantime, Sam was still trying to figure out the exact nature of the amulet. It acted as a shield, but also has a specter of some sort tied to it, for offense. Sam visually tried to appraise it, which was difficult considering the distance, and that Craig was currently arguing with a lot of hand gestures. But when he turned his hand a certain way, Sam saw something he initially dismissed as an optical illusion. But Sam kept his eyes trained on that spot, and when Craig lifted his wrist, Sam saw it again, and knew it wasn't an optical illusion.

The bracelet was growing into Craig's arm.

The metal had fused with the skin beneath, and there were filament thin strands of black radiating from it, up his arm. It was like a disease or an infection. It would probably kill him eventually, but what would it do with Craig in the meantime?

It also left Sam with a truly terrible realization - while Craig wore the bracelet, he was immune from violence. And he couldn't take the bracelet off, because it was a part of him.

Sam backed up slowly, trying not to attract attention, but luckily Craig was still fully engaged in his shouting match with Becky, and didn't notice. "Dean, we have a problem," Sam hissed. He didn't need anyone else hearing this.

"Only the one?" Dean asked.

"It's growing in him. We can't take it off."

"What? What do you mean it's growing in him?"

"Look at his arm."

Dean squinted towards him. "What kind of David Cronenberg level shit is that?"

"No idea. But how are we supposed to get it off of him?"

"Evil Dead it."

It took Sam a couple of seconds to interpret that. Although Sam felt his life was enough of a horror show he didn't need to see fictional ones, Dean loved horror movies, from cheesy big bug ones to genuinely unsettling shit (such as David Cronenberg films). Sam wondered what Dean could have applied himself to if he set aside horror movie knowledge and gave that brain space over to other more productive things. "It produces a shield that seems to keep him from being harmed."

"It's protecting itself, not him," Dean said. Was that a correction? Didn't matter. It felt like a matter of semantics.

"The end result is the same. So how do we get it?"

"Uh ... fuck if I know, kiddo."

Sam almost asked how Dean could casually execute the guy, but he already knew Dean had probably done the hard math, and decided a dead bad guy was the way for everyone still left to survive. it probably wasn't even wrong, save for from a moral standpoint (and even there, an argument could be made). It was all moot, though, since the artifact was protecting Craig.

Becky seemed totally done with Craig. Throughout the yelling she had been crying, but it was angry tears, a phenomenon Sam was familiar with. She wiped her arm across her eyes, and said, "Okay, that's it. I'm taking my sister and leaving. Don't try to stop me."

Craig shook his head. "The only way you're leaving is with me."

"Fuck you." She turned and grabbed Lia's arm, but Becky had barely taken a step forward when Azul popped up in her path. She stopped, clearly still uncertain about preternatural stuff surrounding everything.

"Do I really have to kill your sister, Becky?" Craig asked.

"You balless little coward," Dean snapped. "You get off threatening kids, you motherfucking bastard?"

Craig's evil stare shifted back towards Dean. Was it Sam's imagination, or was there a slight green glow in his eyes as well? Was it infiltrating Craig, like a parasite? "I thought I told you to shut up, pretty boy."

"Come over here and make me do it. Do your own dirty work for once."

"Oh, so you can shoot me in the head, you complete fucking psychopath? How stupid do you think I am?"

"Extremely."

"Dean," Sam hissed. He knew what he was doing, and he needed him to stop. He thought he was close to figuring something out.

"You're so dumb you haven't even realized you're the puppet," Dean continued, ignoring Sam. He was trying to pull Craig's focus again. Whether it was to buy time for the others to get away or to keep him from even thinking about killing Lia, Sam wasn't sure, but while he understood why Dean was doing it, he still wished he wouldn't. Getting himself killed would remove their best chance of survival from the board. "You think you're controlling the amulet? It's controlling you."

"Really? Azul, kill both these assholes," Craig said. The hooded figure didn't move.

Craig scowled. "C'mon, you fucking piece of shit. Become a monster and bite their fucking heads off."

Sam couldn't see a face beneath the shadows of the hood, but he would swear he could feel it staring at him. Why? Why did it stop attacking him?

There was a sound of a hammer being clicked back, and suddenly Dad appeared, aiming a gun at Craig as he walked over and inserted himself between Sam and Azul. "Get the fuck away from my boys."


	6. Dead City

Sam thought he heard a soft noise, sort of a distant thud, as Dad took his place in front of him, but he wasn't immediately sure. But as soon as Dad made some hand signals behind his back, Sam knew he had indeed heard something. He wasn't sure if the hand signal was for him or Dean, but he signaled _"Wait"_. Wait for what?

Craig scoffed again, shaking his head. "So you're psycho dad, huh? Great job raising your kids. Pretty boy's a murderer, and the Poindexter here is a complete idiot."

Didn't Poindexter mean he was smart? Oh well - who was he to correct homicidal guy with an evil object growing inside his body?

Dad didn't take the bait, if that's what it was. "We have a very limited window in which to help you. Let us help. Otherwise, you're dead within twelve hours."

Craig chuckled. "Wow. Did you really think I'd buy that bullshit? I'm invincible."

"And why would someone sell you an object that makes you invincible? Why not use it themselves?"

Craig's grin faltered. Apparently, that hadn't occurred to him. "He didn't know what he had. He thought it was just an Aunt's bracelet or something."

"Come on. You can't be that dumb."

"Yes he can," Dean said.

"What he said," Becky said.

"I'm dumb?" Craig repeated, glaring at Dad. "You're the one aiming the gun at the invincible guy. Your psycho son already tried to shoot me, and failed."

"Where'd you shoot him?" Dad asked. He didn't turn, but it was clearly aimed at Dean.

"Between the eyes." Dean said.

Dad nodded. "That's my boy."

Craig's eyes narrowed. "So you're like what, a traveling murdering family?"

"We're the only people who can save you, if you want to be saved." Dad's gaze and aim had never wavered, but he had slowly snaked a hand inside his coat pocket. What did he have?

"You're demented, old man. You need to be saved from me. Azul, take him out."

Dad pulled out a round glass bottle that Sam instantly recognized. It was what they referred to as a "holy Molotov cocktail", as it was a bottle full of holy water and salt, and sometimes other things, including oils and possibly gasoline, but this one wasn't lit. Dad threw it at Craig's feet, where it shattered, and the energy shield around him flared green, and seemed to become blotchy with black spots, like the holy water/salt bath was toxic.

The second it broke on the ground, Dad stepped aside and shouted, "Now!" Sam wasn't sure what was going on, but something flew through the air, and as soon as Sam realized it was a mini-machete, he knew what that soft noise had been. Dad had dropped it for Dean, and given him the signal to wait.

The machete flew fast, and Azul and Craig didn't see it. But it was a one in a million throw, and sliced straight through Craig's bracelet wearing arm, right below the elbow. He screamed, although the arm was hanging on by a muscle. But not for long, because Dad was there before he was finished recoiling from the initial blow, yanked the machete out of his arm, and took out the clinging tendon with one final hack.

That, for the record, was an Evil Dead. Cutting off the hand, or, in this case, the hand and the forearm.

Craig's scream seemed to ratchet up towards the stratosphere as he collapsed to his knees and grabbed his now maimed arm, blood spurting from the stump. Dad pulled out one of his special marked bags, covered with warding sigils, that he used to contain cursed objects. He placed it over Craig's severed hand, the one with the bracelet on it, and those long, dark tendrils were now visible, wrapped around exposed bone and tendon.

Before Dad could secure the bracelet, Azul appeared in front of him, and Sam had the terrible feeling it was going to attack him. But it didn't. Azul went right past Dad, and collided with Craig.

It was hard to say what happened, because it looked like Azul atomized to the air on impact, while something seemed to be yanked out of Craig. His soul? His life force? Something Sam could only see as a sliver of ghostly light, and only for a millisecond. But Craig's body fell back with the impact, and he was suddenly silent.

As soon as Dad had bagged up the object, he went to check on Craig, and the way he reacted when he saw his face told Sam all he needed to know. Craig could have survived a chopped off limb, but Azul never gave him a choice.

"What the hell just happened?" Antonio asked.

"And where did that machete come from?" Becky asked, still looking around.

Dad didn't answer them. He came up to Sam, visually scanning him. "Are you all right?"

Sam nodded, not adding that he was as surprised as Dad was. "I'm fine. Dean needs a hospital."

"Yeah, I noticed that," Dad said, going to Dean.

"Can no one hear me?" Antonio asked.

Sam sighed. "My guess? Azul got revenge on Craig."

"Why?" Antonio asked.

"It didn't want to be doing this."

"So why was it?" Lia asked.

Sam shrugged. "It had to, I assume."

Dad put his arm around Dean's shoulders and helped him stand, like Dean weighed nothing. Sam really was going to have to work out more, wasn't he? "Do you know what that thing was?" Dean asked.

Dad shook his head. "Not exactly, but I have some guesses."

Sam figured he must have, if he knew the holy molotov would do some damage. Sam cast an apologetic look at Lia, who looked as incredibly freaked out as you might imagine, and followed Dean and Dad out of the woods and towards the road.

It was pretty scenery and all, but he was never going to miss seeing this back side of this place.

* * *

Two Days Later

It was hard to say what was the biggest piece of bullshit to come out of this mess.

Dad was in contention for telling the people at the emergency room Dean had gotten attacked by a bear. It was a weird choice, although bears were known to be in this area, and Dean's injuries were serious enough that they bought it. It still seemed weird.

Was it as weird as the local paper deciding that Craig had killed himself? And Brian and Tom - apparently he never made it out of the woods. Also, Craig had killed his own parents before leaving his house, so they were on the casualty list too. How did a guy kill himself buy cutting off his own arm and ripping out his own soul or whatever? Sam had no idea. What he did understand was it was a more palatable reason than the truth. Sadly, Craig would be neither the first or last violent teenager.

Dad, with some help from Bobby, did find out exactly what Craig had. In the later nineteenth and early twentieth century, it was known that some demons, who cut a deal with witches and warlocks, would imprison their souls in special charms and amulets, and then market them to people as things that could bring their wildest dreams to life. It was a special way to torment these witches and wizards, as it subjected them to both indentured servitude and a special kind of living death at the same time. There was a catch to the jewelry, of course. The charm would pull its energy from the life force of the user, so the more you used it, the faster it killed you. And of course your soul was corrupted to, so once you were dead, the demon got your soul, and the charm back, to pass it on to another victim. It was super insidious, and worked gangbusters for them, because who didn't want everything they'd ever dreamed for? No one stopped to think about the actual price they'd pay for it.

Hunters destroyed most of them, but apparently there were a few still floating around. No one knew the exact number. But to get rid of these things, you had to melt it down in a fire, encase it in salt, and bury it on sacred or hallowed ground. Dad did that dutifully, as he was nothing if not thorough. Sam also helped Dad go to the pawn shop and search it for any possibly cursed or dangerous items the demon may have also left off, but they didn't find anything.

Sam knew he wasn't Dad's first choice in this hunt, but Dean was still in the hospital. He wanted to leave, of course, but he'd lost so much blood he needed a transfusion. The doctor was flabbergasted he was still conscious when he was brought in, but they didn't know Dean's super secret stubborn asshole power. As his brother, Sam was sadly all too aware of it.

Sam had asked his Dad why he thought Azul was supposedly afraid of him, and Dad said that, after attacking them earlier, the witch probably figured out they were hunters, and was simply not going after them (him) as hard because Azul thought they were his/her best hope to escape. There was some plausibility in that, but it didn't quite feel right to Sam. Still, he wasn't up to pressing it, and Dean was right - when Dad didn't want to tell you something, nothing could make him do it.

Right now, they were packing up the house. They were leaving tonight, which meant they were picking up Dean at the hospital on the way out of town, and because Dean was laid up, Sam had to pack up his stuff. Luckily, he didn't have much that was unpacked. But Sam still found some surprises. He expected the small stash of phone numbers, written on napkins or scraps of paper, the loose pills and condoms, but he wasn't expecting to find a cassette with someone else's writing on it. Someone made him a mix tape? Why had he never mentioned that? Add to that, he found a grungy copy of Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas, with a note written on the title page: _'Dean - Hope you like this as much as I did - Alex'_. Okay - who the hell was Alex? And why did she - or he; there was no way to tell - give Dean a book? One that he was reading, judging from the bar matchbook cover he was using as a bookmark. It was these little mysteries that gave him hope for Dean. If he had a hidden life no one knew about, maybe he wasn't Dad's perfect foot soldier. Maybe he could eventually have his own life.

Sam had tried to talk to him about that before, but it always ended up in the same old argument. Sam didn't see why they couldn't live their own lives, free of Dad's vengeance quest. It wasn't that he didn't get it, or didn't want to kill the demon who killed their Mom, because he totally did. But they didn't have to do this forever! There was no way being a hunter ended well. And at a certain point, you couldn't lead a normal life. You knew too much of monsters and maniacs, and how did you have a normal life after that? He and Dean needed to go before they were warped for good. Although sometimes he was convinced it was already way too late for Dean.

Sam dreamed a lot about life beyond this. He thought a lot about going to college and living like he was an orphan, with no family and no history. He could be a clean slate, someone new entirely, and not tethered to family guilt or monsters. Sometimes it seemed like a fairy tale more than something that was possible.

Sam had returned to his room to pack up - he was not quite a pro of living out of suitcases, not as much as he felt he should be - when he heard a sharp tap against his window. He looked up, wondering if he misheard it, and there was another tap, although this time he saw the pebble hit the glass.

He walked over, curious, and opened the window to find Lia standing outside. "As this is the ground floor, can I ask why you're tossing pebbles?" Sam asked. He could have reached out and touched her, if he was so inclined.

She grimaced, dropping her handful of tiny rocks. "I had to work up the courage to get this close to your house, so give me a break."

"Sure. How are you doing? How's Becky?"

"She's reluctant to admit it, but she's relieved. Craig was a total stalker. Although ... did he deserve to die like that? Also, how did he die exactly? I'm still not clear on that."

Sam realized if it was hard for him to grasp, it must have been impossible for her, a civilian. "The short version? Angry witch fucked him up."

"And it wasn't your brother and father chopping off his arm?"

Sam shook his head. "You may not believe this, but they were trying to save him by removing the bracelet. It's just it had grown into his wrist, so they had to take it with."

She nodded. "I guess that makes sense. I didn't know you could throw a machete."

"You can if you know what you're doing. And the smaller ones are easier to throw with accuracy." Just by saying that, Sam realized he had permanently marked himself as a weirdo. Oh well. At least he was on his way out of town.

Lia gave him a bit of side eye, which felt warranted. "You're as dangerous as your brother and your dad, aren't you?"

Sam shrugged. "Pretty much. It's not something I like to advertise."

"Oh, speaking of which, Antonio is still completely terrified of your brother, and wants his phone number like yesterday."

Sam smirked. "Well, we're leaving, so he's going to have to find another hot, dangerous guy."

"You're leaving? Why?"

Sam wasn't sure if he should tell her the truth or not. What was the harm? She already knew about cursed objects. "We move around a lot. Hazard of the job."

"Because some weirdo sold Craig a killer bracelet?"

"It wasn't a weirdo. Black eyes usually mean demon."

Her eyes widened slightly . "Demons exist?"

"Yes."

"Does that mean Hell exists?"

"Yeah, although it's not exactly like traditional Hell, I think. From what I understand, it's really complicated, but being a bad person doesn't mean you go to hell when you die. Get damned or corrupted, or sell your soul, then yes. But that's pretty much it."

She took that in, still looking at him like he was a grenade with a loose pin. "Does that mean Heaven exists?"

"According to my Dad, we have no facts to support that."

Lia tilted her head slightly. "You phrased that weird. Does that mean you disagree with him?"

"I'm just ... keeping my options open. Technically, no, we've seen no evidence of the divine, but ... maybe? I'm not ready to write it off yet." Now that was a different argument he'd had with Dean and Dad both, but nowhere near as serious as their other arguments. But they seemed convinced there was Hell and that was it, and Heaven was a fluffy fairy tale people told themselves to make them feel better. Sam thought they were simply trying to out cynical each other, like it was a contest. Yes, they were both macho and hard bitten, good for them. It wasn't a reason to write off hope.

She nodded, putting her hands in her coat pocket. There was a little coldness in the air. Spring hadn't completely settled in yet. "How's your brother?"

"He's fine. Already complaining about hospital food." Actually, that was a lie. Dean rarely complained about food, except to say there wasn't enough of it.

"I honestly didn't know people had so much blood in them."

Sam knew that feeling. The first time Dad came back with a major injury, he was sure he was going to die. He was only six, so he could be excused for it, but it seemed like there was a river of blood from the door to his bedroom. It really scared the shit out of him. "Yeah, the first time you see somebody bleeding out, it's a wake up call. Humans are really fragile, but we live our lives like we're not. It doesn't take all that much to hurt us and kill us."

She stared at him for a moment, and Sam wondered what he said that was so objectionable. It was true. "This life must be very lonely."

Sam shrugged, but internally, he winced. That's what he gave away. "I got my brother and Dad." Mostly his brother, but he didn't tell her that. She knew too much about him already." I'm better off than most."

"Still seems really lonely." Lia seemed to realize this was kind of a weird thing for him to talk about, because she switched subjects. "By the way, thank you."

"For what?"

She scoffed. "For what? If you and your brother hadn't come along, we'd all be dead. So thank you for saving us, you stupid ass."

Sam smiled briefly, wondering why it felt so weird to be thanked. "I'm sorry about Brian and Tom."

"Yeah, we all are. But we could have joined them, so I guess we're lucky." Lia leaned forward, and kissed him on the cheek. "Take care of yourself, Sam."

Sam felt himself flush, and he was somehow embarrassed by his own embarrassment, which honestly shouldn't have been possible. In what universe did it make sense that your own awkwardness made you awkward? Luckily, Lia had turned and started walking away. "You take care of yourself too," he said, hoping she didn't notice how weird he sounded. Smooth he wasn't.

He closed the window, and was surprised to find he was going to kind of miss this place. He didn't think so an hour ago.

Sam was startled when he heard a knock, but it was just Dad. "Starting to load the car up. You ready?"

"Yeah, just about," he replied, shoving his remaining books in his backpack. He decided to leave behind ones he'd already read and didn't need, for someone else to find. Unlike Dean, Sam liked to leave these little crumbs sometimes, proof that he had been here, even if he was the only one who knew it.

Sam was sure that, one day, he'd have a life beyond this. One day he wouldn't be a hunter, and he wouldn't be constantly on the move.

He could dream, couldn't he?

* * *

 _The End_


End file.
